Many people are under the wrong impression of how lifting weights and exercising can help your body build muscle. It is not during exercise that Muscle recovery develops, but during what is called the post-exercise recovery period. When you use a muscle, its fibers break. During recovery, these fibers are repaired and lead to muscle growth. You won’t see the results you want if you don’t allow enough time for your muscles to recover.
In addition to allowing muscle growth, muscle recovery periods help protect muscles from strain and injury. When muscles work hard, they are more prone to injury. Attempting to exercise without recovery time is likely to result in a strained muscle injury.
Injured muscles can take weeks or even months to heal. It can prevent you from exercising. You don’t want that to happen. If your muscles are damaged, you can stop exercising altogether. For example, if a large muscle like your quadriceps is injured, you will have a hard time doing any exercise that uses this muscle, even cardio. This can actually cause you to go back on your fitness program and lose muscle you’ve already built.
It is important to pay attention to your body and its needs. Muscles need time to heal. Even a good workout will damage your muscles. As mentioned, it is this damage that causes muscles to grow. However, if you try to overuse your muscles, you cause damaging damage that takes a long time to heal. That is why recovery is so important.
Rest is the best way to restore muscles. Typically, strength training exercises involve using a muscle group to failure. This means exercising until you can no longer exercise in good shape. The muscles are really well exercised with this type of training. After working a muscle group, you’ll want to take a break. This means that you no longer do exercises that target that muscle group for a period of time. A general rule of thumb for muscle recovery is to allow at least 24 hours between workouts. That doesn’t mean you can’t exercise every day. What this means is that you shouldn’t be working the same muscle group two days in a row.
Most people do a combination of exercises that alternate between upper and lower body exercises. Different people may use different muscle groups each day. Here is an example of a 5 day workout.
Day 1: triceps, biceps
Day 2: Quads, Hamstrings, Glutes
Day 3: Abs, back
Day 4: Shoulders, Chest, Back
Day 5: calves, biceps
